Novell and Microsoft recently entered into an agreement regarding software patents (really?) that betrays the rest of the Free Software community, including the very people who wrote Novell's own system, for Novell's sole financial beneift, according to Bruce Perens. Join Perens in signing an open letter to Novell's CEO Ron Hovsepian. "As the agreement stands today, it betrays the authors of the software you re-market and their users worldwide for Novell's sole commercial benefit."

I've copied my post here since I think it's relevant, and since I doubt that many people would have the patience to read it at the end of that long list...

I was a huge fan of Suse and then openSuse for years, but now I've decided not to support your company. With this agreement, you have turned your back on the rest of the Linux community by deciding to stop giving back to it. This is visible in the form of Mono, which now has more of a patent shadow over it then ever before, and so is unusable by the rest of the community, and in the form of the closed-source endeavors that you have chosen to pursue with Microsoft in the future, instead of attempting to build open-source interoperability solutions that would benefit the rest of the Linux community. It seems you are attempting to hijack products such as OpenOffice and Samba, which were mostly developed outside of your company, by creating closed-source extensions to them so that your versions will be the only viable ones in the future. This is quite simply counter to the entire spirit and point of free software, however legally you may be able to sneak around the GPL to do it. OSS is supposed to be about working as a team, and instead you have decided to turn your back on the very community that made your distribution possible. To top it off, as if your mixed-source (read: lock-in) fantasies weren't enough, you are helping Microsoft spread FUD about Linux's patent liabilities, you are supporting the innovation-stifling concept of software patents, and you are helping to propogate a potential MS patent trap--Mono (which this agreement has now proven to be unsafe). I used to be a true believer in and lover of the Suse/openSuse distro, and I am very disheartened to have to leave it behind. However, I cannot allow myself to support such unethical behavior as yours, which threatens to tear the Linux community apart (and in fact has already done so to a very large extent).